FOR DECADES, NOBODY in the US had seen the bee. The silver-haired black Epeoloides pilosula was once widespread in New England, often found where native yellow loosestrife plants grew. But as the region’s pastoral landscapes gave way to forests, the bee lost its sunny open home. In 1927 it was spotted in a Needham meadow and then, despite years of searching, not again. By the start of this century, dejected bee lovers were forced to conclude that the insect was likely extinct in the US. Then, one bright June day in 2006, eureka: The bee was found in a hillside meadow by David Wagner, a University of Connecticut conservation biologist conducting a two-year bee survey in southern New England. Once the species was confirmed, there was a celebratory Mexican dinner and a published paper that rippled through the conservation world. If a rare bee like that could be found again, biologists reasoned, maybe there were other rare bees, plants, and wildlife hidden in similar environments. Even more remarkable, though, was the environment where this find was made: In a 250-foot-wide power line corridor off Route 163 in Southeastern Connecticut. Transmission corridors have long been considered symbols of environmental degradation, with their enormous steel skeletons and high-voltage lines slicing through forests, wetlands, and salt marshes; they divide the landscapes that thousands of species need to survive. Yet now they are gaining a new reputation: As critical homes for faltering species of birds, bees, butterflies, plants, and a host of other species.

more from Beth Daley at the Boston Globe here.

Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species was first published on November 24, 1859. Today marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of the landmark book. John Wilkins considers what would've happened in a world in which it wasn't published (via SEK at Lawyers, Guns and Money):

The Origin acted as a seed in a supersaturated cultural solution. The solution was already set to crystalise, and he came along and made evolution, phylogeny, heredity, dispersal, and other topics respectable. So far from being a “class traitor” as Desmond and Moore make him out to be, Darwin’s bourgeois respectability is what made him effective as a motivator of evolutionary biology, where evolution had previously been seen as politics in naturalists’ dress. He was in many ways more prescient than those who followed him. But had he not lived, had he drowned on the Beagle voyage, as Peter Bowler is presently writing a what-if history, would we have had evolution anyway? Almost certainly. If Owen hadn’t shaken off the shackles of the clergy who ran Cambridge, very likely others would have. But the tenor of the field would have been somewhat different. Here’s how I think it would have played out, based on a discussion with Bowler about his work. Anything original is his.

Common descent/phylogeny might not have developed as early. Heinrich Bronn had given an “evolutionary tree” in 1858, but his mechanism was no different to Buffon’s – the degeneration of types from an original stock; basically evolution was localised and played out on existing potentialities.

Natural selection might not have been seen to be a mechanism of evolution for another fifty years, and when it was, it would not have been in terms of an analogy with artificial selection. Wallace would have been “rediscovered” the way Mendel was, without being all that influential directly. Sexual selection might not have popped up until the mid-20th century or so.

There would have been a much stronger emphasis on developmental biology, coming out of von Baer’s work and later experimental developmental biology in Germany. Evo-devo would have been the first state of the field.

A Variation

And I really don’t know
now when was I very
honest and when
was I not, it cannot be
distinguished
and it’s hard to sort it out. For there’s no
lie which could not
be used in order to keep
things as they are
really or in reality, I wonder
which of these is the correct
expression here, I cannot remember,
but somehow the word
real has to be in it.
And because I do not change
at all, for better or for worse,
I’m not uglier or more beautiful
than before, up or down. Or
maybe just a shade. But:
to die: no. Death is not an option.
It’s possible that
while I am changing, I usually
sleep through those hours.
Or else am hovering upside down.

by Endre Kukorelly
translation, George Gömöri, 2001

Natalie Angier in The New York Times:

As the festival of mandatory gratitude looms into view, allow me to offer a few suggestions on what, exactly, you should be thankful for. Be thankful that, on at least one occasion, your mother did not fend off your father with a pair of nunchucks, but instead allowed enough contact to facilitate your happy conception. Be thankful that when you go to buy a pale, poultrylike entity, the grocery clerk will accept your credit card in good faith and even return it with a heroic garble of your last name. Be grateful for the empathetic employee working the United Airlines ticket counter the day after Thanksgiving, who understands why you must leave town today, this very minute, lest someone pull out the family nunchucks.

Above all, be thankful for your brain’s supply of oxytocin, the small, celebrated peptide hormone that, by the looks of it, helps lubricate our every prosocial exchange, the thousands of acts of kindness, kind-of kindness and not-as-nakedly-venal-as-I-could-have-been kindness that make human society possible. Scientists have long known that the hormone plays essential physiological roles during birth and lactation, and animal studies have shown that oxytocin can influence behavior too, prompting voles to cuddle up with their mates, for example, or to clean and comfort their pups. Now a raft of new research in humans suggests that oxytocin underlies the twin emotional pillars of civilized life, our capacity to feel empathy and trust.

More here.

An amnesiac action hero who battles a mystifying web of enemies, Jason Bourne has outlived his author. David Samuels considers the enduring appeal of the kicking, punching, paranoiac babe in the woods.

David Samuels in The National:

The news that there is yet another new novel out featuring the amnesiac action hero Jason Bourne is not all that surprising, despite the fact that Bourne’s creator, Robert Ludlum, is dead. Since Ludlum’s demise in 2001, his hero has appeared in four new books, which is one more Bourne novel than Ludlum wrote during his lifetime. Appearing at the rate of nearly one per year, the new Bourne adventures, written by Eric Van Lustbader, are an attempt to capitalise both on the popular action movies starring Matt Damon and on the uneasily repressed paranoia that has suffused American popular culture since the September 11 terror attacks.

With over 290 million copies of his own novels in print, Ludlum can rightly be seen as the godfather of the paranoid style in American paramilitary entertainment. Whatever literary qualities his work may be lacking – beginning with unsteady sentences that can leave the reader wondering if the author is drunk – Ludlum was a skilled orchestrator of dramatic action scenes in which the forgetful but physically able hero is united with his surroundings in the all-embracing vision of a true paranoiac. Ludlum’s thrillers are the low-culture equivalent of Thomas Pynchon’s crack-brained high-end fictions, in which comic book characters inhabit a deterministic universe controlled by unseen hands. But where Pynchon’s plots are backdrops for the play of the author’s preoccupations with tarot cards, zeppelins and other Lewis Carroll-like amusements, Ludlum’s stories are games of chicken in which the author fights to keep a stiff upper lip in the face of characters who seem forever in danger of leaping free from the normal confines of the airport thriller and comporting themselves like ultra-violent versions of the singing, dancing characters in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg – declaiming odd lines of dialogue while kicking each other in the face and shooting flare guns in the air.

More here.

Jeremy Scahill in The Nation:

At a covert forward operating base run by the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in the Pakistani port city of Karachi, members of an elite division of Blackwater are at the center of a secret program in which they plan targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives, “snatch and grabs” of high-value targets and other sensitive action inside and outside Pakistan, an investigation by The Nation has found. The Blackwater operatives also assist in gathering intelligence and help run a secret US military drone bombing campaign that runs parallel to the well-documented CIA predator strikes, according to a well-placed source within the US military intelligence apparatus.

The source, who has worked on covert US military programs for years, including in Afghanistan and Pakistan, has direct knowledge of Blackwater's involvement. He spoke to The Nation on condition of anonymity because the program is classified. The source said that the program is so “compartmentalized” that senior figures within the Obama administration and the US military chain of command may not be aware of its existence.

The White House did not return calls or email messages seeking comment for this story. Capt. John Kirby, the spokesperson for Adm. Michael Mullen, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told The Nation, “We do not discuss current operations one way or the other, regardless of their nature.”

More here.

Malcolm Gladwell responds to Steven Pinker's review of his new book:

I wondered about the basis of Pinker’s conclusion, so I e-mailed him, asking if he could tell me where to find the scientific data that would set me straight. He very graciously wrote me back. He had three sources, he said. The first was Steve Sailer. Sailer, for the uninitiated, is a California blogger with a marketing background who is best known for his belief that black people are intellectually inferior to white people. Sailer’s “proof” of the connection between draft position and performance is, I’m sure Pinker would agree, crude: his key variable is how many times a player has been named to the Pro Bowl. Pinker’s second source was a blog post, based on four years of data, written by someone who runs a pre-employment testing company, who also failed to appreciate—as far as I can tell (the key part of the blog post is only a paragraph long)—the distinction between aggregate and per-play performance. Pinker’s third source was an article in the Columbia Journalism Review, prompted by my essay, that made an argument partly based on a link to a blog called “Niners Nation.” I have enormous respect for Professor Pinker, and his description of me as “minor genius” made even my mother blush. But maybe on the question of subjects like quarterbacks, we should agree that our differences owe less to what can be found in the scientific literature than they do to what can be found on Google.

More here.

William Anastasi. Nine Polaroid Photos of a Mirror. 1967

More here, here, and here.

In Washington Monthly, Paul Hockenos reviews Günter Grass's Unterwegs von Deutschland nach Deutschland: Tagebuch 1990 (On the Road From Germany to Germany: Diary 1990):

In the diary, which is punctuated with Grass’s own quirky ink sketchings, the then sixty-two-year-old embarks on a series of extended reading tours to eastern cities like Leipzig, Dresden, and Cottbus, as well as further-flung locales in the forests of Mark Brandenburg and along the coast of the Baltic Sea. He crisscrosses borders that had just weeks before been the Iron Curtain—the watchtowers still in place—where good-humored East German guards just wave his car through. One asks to have a copy of The Tin Drum autographed. Grass remarks with consternation at the eastern Germans’ new obsession with products from the west, as if a carton of milk with advertising on it were better than milk from a state-run cooperative in unadorned packaging. “The money, the money’s got to come,” a Leipzig taxi driver tells him. “It doesn’t matter how; the main thing is the money.”

Like just about everyone on the German left, Grass is shocked when the freshly liberated easterners throw their first democratic vote behind the West German–backed conservatives, spurning not only the Social Democrats but also the courageous dissidents who were the catalyst for the peaceful revolution of autumn 1989. The conservative landslide sets the stage for unification, thereafter a question of how and not whether. Grass shakes his head in disbelief as his good friend Willy Brandt, the world-famous Social Democrat and elder statesman, welcomes German unity, even appearing publicly alongside Kohl. Clearly, Germans are on a fast track to a one-sided unification.

Initially, Grass objects outright to settling the greatest of all German questions—the nation’s proper borders—with a one-state solution. Now long forgotten, there was an array of options for the two Germanys under discussion in early 1990, including ideas of an independent, democratic GDR that coexisted alongside the mighty Federal Republic. Germany still owes a debt to humanity, Grass argued, namely the one it incurred as perpetrator of the Holocaust. Germany’s division is the price it pays for Auschwitz.

Justin Smith in Counterpunch:

In a recent ruling, Judge Malcolm Howard of the Federal District Court in Greenville, North Carolina, determined that the execution by lethal injection of Willie Brown Jr. may not proceed unless appropriate medical supervision of the process can be ensured. This ruling followed upon the presentation of evidence that all too often executioners without medical training do a poor job of administering the cocktail of chemicals required, and that as a consequence the prisoner often suffers needlessly.

North Carolina prison officials have been ordered to tell the court by this week how they will comply with its order requiring medically trained personnel to ensure that Brown is unconscious during his execution, currently scheduled for April 21. The officials have been asked a question they cannot possibly answer, and we can only hope that their conundrum will lead to a stay of execution for the prisoner.

As Adam Liptak reported recently in the New York Times (“Judges Set Hurdles for Lethal Injection,” April 12, 2006), increasingly the drug protocol used nationwide since the 1970s –originally devised by the Oklahoma Department of Corrections in consultation with the state medical examiner– is being denounced by critics as too complex and as medically unjustifiable.

Over at the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers:

Experiments in the Humanities features two world-renowned humanists interested in bringing empirical methods to bear on longstanding questions in their disciplines: Stephen Stich, Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers will discuss how research in cognitive science can advance and transform traditional philosophical debates, especially in moral theory. Franco Moretti, Professor of English at Stanford, will discuss how quantitative analysis can illuminate our understanding of the novel, especially questions of plot.

a must watch (h/t Shuffy G.).

Jeffrey D. Sachs in Project Syndicate:

It is hard for international observers of the United States to grasp the political paralysis that grips the country, and that seriously threatens America’s ability to solve its domestic problems and contribute to international problem solving. America’s governance crisis is the worst in modern history. Moreover, it is likely to worsen in the years ahead.

The difficulties that President Barack Obama is having in passing his basic program, whether in health care, climate change, or financial reform, are hard to understand at first glance. After all, he is personally popular, and his Democratic Party holds commanding majorities in both houses of Congress. Yet his agenda is stalled and the country’s ideological divisions grow deeper.

Among Democrats, Obama’s approval rating in early November was 84%, compared with just 18% among Republicans. Fifty-eight percent of Democrats thought the country was headed in the right direction, compared with 9% of Republicans. Only 18 % of Democrats supported sending 40,000 more troops to Afghanistan, while 57% of Republicans supported a troop buildup. In fact, a significant majority of Democrats, 60%, favored a reduction of troops in Afghanistan, compared with just 26% of Republicans. On all of these questions, a middle ground of independents (neither Democrats nor Republicans) was more evenly divided.

Part of the cause for these huge divergences in views is that America is an increasingly polarized society. Political divisions have widened between the rich and poor, among ethnic groups (non-Hispanic whites versus African Americans and Hispanics), across religious affiliations, between native-born and immigrants, and along other social fault lines. American politics has become venomous as the belief has grown, especially on the vocal far right, that government policy is a “zero-sum” struggle between different social groups and politics.

Splitting Wood
…………………..

Remembering my brother
…………………..

October seems too swift

mushrooms melt into the soil

and salamanders rise from beneath the earth

like the dead doing a dance
…………………..

and time itself is a wedge forced into heartwood

splitting decades into neat bundles
…………………..

……but the cords

stacked with the promise of heat

are never enough
…………………..

……there’s still that chill

that certain need for another autumn
…………………..

for days my muscles still ache

with the memory of motion
…………………..

for days I remember one chunk

splitting into two

falling open like books

like arms of a dead brother
…………………..

and the perfume of cedar

……rising
…………………..

it’s in this space between two seasons

deftly blended with the flat of a thumb

as languid as a plush cat stretching before

the incessant heat of a woodstove
…………………..

when sky and land fuse

into the same bottomless gray
…………………..

the entire world becomes a sponge

and each step squeezes juice

from its pores
…………………..

when losses splinter off like kindling

when I turn back to kiss this blank page

……of fog

whispering politely.
…………………..
…………………..

by Patrick Loafman
from The Poetry Journal; Issue 1, Spring 2008

From Salon:

In a fitting metaphor, the most recent experiment with social darwinism resulted in mass extinction. Former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling claimed he was inspired by Richard Dawkins’ book The Selfish Gene when he implemented a system known as “rank and yank” that sought to apply nature’s lessons to the energy industry. Skilling had all employees in the company ranked every six months. Then he offered lavish bonuses to the top 5 percent while the bottom 15 percent were relocated or fired. This system of ruthless competition advanced just the type of personalities that one would expect: crazy people. As one Enron employee put it, “If I’m going to my boss’s office to talk about compensation, and if I step on some guy’s throat and that doubles it, then I’ll stomp on that guy’s throat.” However, what was perhaps most disturbing is that according to Time magazine, 20 percent of US companies were following the same business model at the time of Enron’s collapse. Enron’s self-destruction was only the first in a nationwide trend. But what, if anything, does this say about nature?

In his latest book, The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society, primatologist Frans de Waal argues that social darwinists like Skilling have learned the wrong lessons about the natural world. The nasty, brutish existence dominated by “savage competition, ruthless exploitation, and deceit” that Dawkins describes is far from the norm for animals that live in social groups. They thrive because of the cooperation, conciliation, and, above all, the empathy that they display towards fellow members. The support and protection they receive from living in a group more than compensates for any selfish advantage they might have achieved on their own. In other words, the “selfish gene” has discovered that the most successful approach is to behave unselfishly. De Waal thus argues that the age of empathy is far older than our own species and that we must keep this in mind as we try to apply these lessons ourselves.

More here.

From Edge:

“What is this stuff, you ask one another,” says the narrator in Rebecca Newberger Goldstein's new novel 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, “and how can it still be kicking around, given how much we already know?” We have very short memories. It was in April 2006 that President George W. Bush, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, and Senator John McCain all announced their support of teaching Intelligent Design in public schools. This assault on science and on the separation of church and state was a mobilizing moment for the Edge community which responded to this initiative with book of essays by 16 eminent scientists entitled Intelligent Thought, excerpts from which appeared on Edge. At the time, three and a half years ago, no one was using the phrase “the new atheists”. In fact, in early 2006 only Sam Harris's book The End of Faith (2004), and Daniel C. Dennett's Breaking the Spell (February, 2006) had been published. It was in response to the highly organized and well-financed campaign by the religious right that led champions of rational thinking such as Jerry Coyne, Richard Dawkins, Daniel C. Dennett, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, A.C. Grayling, and P.Z. Myers to mount an unrelenting campaign against the purveyors of superstition, supernaturalism, ignorance … and their apologists (the self-proclaimed “moderates”, or to use more apt terms, the “accommodationists”, or the “faitheists”).

The term “the new atheists” came into play in early 2007, followed by “I am an atheist, but”. This is hardly the lingo of the far right. In fact, you don't have to leave the pages of Edge to read variations on this meme from some very distinguished and respected scientists. But what some appear to be saying is “I am an atheist but… other people, not as smart as I am, require religion (a) to get through the day, (b) to create sustainable societies, (c) to have moral values, etc. Others, intellectually lazy, afraid, or unable to invent their own personal narratives, simply wear their parents' old ideas like a hand-me-down suit, defaulting to the maudlin sentimentality that is the soundtrack to the American mind. Now, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, known to Edge readers as a philosopher who has interesting things to say about Gödel and Spinoza, among others, enters into this conversation, taking on these and wider themes, and pushing the envelope by crossing over into the realm of fiction.

More here.